Collections & Series

Who was Cassandra?

In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well, you know what happened.

Poetically, the Carter's overalls proudly displayed in the photo above, taken in 1973, were made in the old Carter's garment factory that is now home to AVA Gallery and Art Center, where Jonathan will be exhibiting!

The show runs at AVA from April 17 through May 20, and on May 20 he'll be giving a gallery talk at 5:30 pm. Both events, and the exhibition itself, are free and open to the public. We'll both be there and would be delighted to see you, and I'd be especially thrilled to meet any Cassandra Pages readers I've never met in person!

AVA is one of the most established and prestigious non-profit art centers in northern New England. It has beautiful large gallery spaces, and five contemporary artists will be exhibiting during this time period. One of our old friends, Joan Morris, an extremely talented textile artist who works with shaped-resist dyeing, is among them, and I'm looking forward very much to seeing her recent work.

Jonathan's show will be in the upstairs Johnson Sisters Library; there will be delicious refreshments, nice people to meet, signed prints and books for sale, and a good time to be had!

December 12, 2014

The lace in this doorway is typical of old entrances in the Plateau; there are different kinds of lace curtains but all are made to the dimensions of the long glass windows in entrance doors. I especially like the scalloped and tasseled detail here, at the bottom. This one is made using a technique called filet crochet, and reminds me of the intricate scenes my neighbor Esther used to crochet back in Vermont. She was from an old Quebecois family, and had probably learned the art as a child - but back then, I never made the connection. Filet crochet can range from fairly coarse detail to extremely fine, depending on the size of thread used - and of course, the finer the thread and detail, the longer it takes. As in needlepoint or crosstitch, patterns are charted out on graph paper, with the squares corresponding to the crochet stitches.

Most windows, however, don't act as such perfect mirrors of the scene outside as the one on the right did, this particular morning.

August 25, 2014

Over the past few days I've finally had time to do a little artwork, inspired by our recent stay in the mountains. This isn't a literal interpretation but it gets across the feeling of a particular spot. I'd like to do some more explorations of this composition, maybe using different media. I was fascinated by the huge glacial erratics in the middle of the woods -- poised so precariously, it seemed, but actually very solidly positioned right where they've been since the glaciers retreated -- in contrast to the flowing stream, but the forms had their own abstract interest that I've only begun to explore here.

August 21, 2014

All of these pictures were taken last weekend near a remote lake in the Green Mountains of Vermont. It was very quiet. We went out on the lake in kayaks, and a loon surfaced about 20 feet from the boat; we hiked in an old-growth forest between white birch trees and huge glacial erratics overgrown with moss and ferns, along a hidden brook flowing on smoothed granite sleek enough to slide down. There were boulders big enough to hide a bear, and tiny homes of small creatures, complete with miniature pine trees, lichen-spores, and mossy lawns, and I moved between the two worlds of my own crushing largeness, and my smallness, dwarfed by the mountains and their vast green blankets of trees.

September 10, 2013

Last Thursday we left Montreal again and went back to our former home on the border of Vermont and New Hampshire for the wedding of a dear young friend. While there we also caught up with several other old friends and family members, in the first few days of the beautiful New England autumn, and it was, to say the least, an absolutely wonderful few days -- a homecoming of sorts, a time of connecting and reconnecting with people we love very much.

The wedding was truly beautiful, and also ended up feeling, to us, like a celebration of our own long connection with a family who were our next-door neighbors, back when we were the age of the bride and groom: we've known the bride from the day of her birth, and are very close to her brother and sister and their parents. There were lots of happy tears and lots of laughter.

The bride had asked me to read or write something for her wedding, and after considering a number of options I decided to try to write a sonnet. During the composition it doubled in size, becoming a 28-line poem, but I managed to keep the whole thing in iambic pentameter. I read it during the ceremony, right after they exchanged their vows. Because it was personal and written for them, I'm not going to share it here, but the whole thing was a wonderful experience for me, and apparently it was moving for other people as well. I'm so glad that they asked me, and that I decided to go ahead and challenge myself to write and present a personalized marriage ode, since that's what it ended up being.

While there, we also celebrated connections in art, in music, in long friendships and in welcoming new life. We visited the home of our friend who is the director of a gallery and art center with which I was once very involved, especially to see her daughter and partner and their beautiful three-week-old baby, and we had lunch with a lifelong friend and musician, now approaching his 75th birthday -- he and I spent quite a while at the piano, listening to his latest compositions and playing some four-hand duets, and talking about his new CD which Phoenicia will be publishing later this year. And we met our niece and sister/sister-in-law at the gorgeous new cafe at King Arthur Flour, a business that's grown exponentially since our early days in Vermont. During the long weekend, we stayed at the home of the other couple with whom we've been very close friends for thirty years, catching up with them and with their youngest son, who's an accomplished guitarist and recent graduate of the Berkeley School of Music, just starting out in his career.

It sounds like an idealized vision of the world -- all this happiness -- but of course that's not the whole picture. These relationships are special because they span a lot of years during which we've shared both the dark and the light times in our lives. Nearly all of the people I'm talking about here, including ourselves, have had hardships, illness, and loss in their lives; part of the reason we wanted to go down and visit right now are the recent deaths of two mutual friends. We talked a good deal about American and Canadian politics and events in Syria and the world - particularly poignant because J.'s father was born in Damascus, and the family has many continuing connections to the Middle East. Economic conditions have affected almost everyone in the U.S., not least of all the young; that subject came up too, along with the changes in society over the past decade and a half.

But the realization, after more than thirty years of relationship, is that nothing is more important than friends and family, and that we want and need to spend more time with the people we love. During these days my heart was so full, both with love I wanted to give, and with love received. It's only later in life, I think, that we begin to understand how love actually works, and that the parables are right: mustard seeds actually do grow into great bushes; a vineyard needs to be pruned and cared for; the wine-jug of love and hospitality is actually bottomless, and we don't need to fear it running dry.

And now we're back home; I'm in the studio with the cat on my lap, thinking ahead to fall, singing, writing, working, and staying put for a while.

April 22, 2013

This from VT Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which just opened hearings on a proposed overhaul of the country's immigration system:

“Last week, opponents of comprehensive immigration reform began to
exploit the Boston Marathon bombing,” Mr. Leahy said. “I urge restraint
in that regard. Refugees and asylum seekers have enriched the fabric of
this country from our founding. In Vermont, we welcome as neighbors
Bhutanese, Burmese, Somalis, just as other states have welcomed
immigrants to America for refuge and opportunity, whether it’s the Hmong
in Minnesota, Vietnamese-Americans in California, Virginia and Texas,
Cuban-Americans in Florida and New Jersey, or Iraqis in Utah. Our
history is full of these stories of salvation."

“Let no one be so cruel as to try to use the heinous acts of these two
young men last week to derail the dreams and futures of millions of
hard-working people,” Mr. Leahy said. “The bill before us would serve to
strengthen our national security by allowing us to focus our border
security and enforcement efforts against those who do us harm, but a
nation as strong as ours can welcome the oppressed and persecuted
without making compromise in our security.”

December 13, 2012

Today I was going through old picture archives, looking for something else, when I came across a set of photographs I took of my studio spaces back in Vermont, six years ago. I must have taken them because we were starting to think about moving from that house, where we had lived for 30 years. I haven't looked at pictures of our old house very much since we moved; maybe I didn't want to, maybe I knew I needed time to replace old familiar images with new ones. Now, though, looking at these spaces again, I was surprised by my reactions.

I worked in several different rooms in that old house. The picture at the top is of a wall in what J. always called my "anti-room." It was indeed an anteroom that had been added onto the main house, over a crawl space - the pipes froze here regularly - but the pun J. was making had to do with the fact that it was a very analog space, devoid of the computers in the rest of our work area -- in this one a lot of handwork took place! This was a wall of formal calligraphy practice sheets and several experimental calligraphy pieces, created in mixed-media with multi-layered lettering, and printing, in acrylic, Chinese inks, and gouache.

This is the same room, further to the right, showing the book press and some early linocuts, and a general mess; looking at the pictures now, all I can remember is how impossible it was for me to work in such a small space with so little table space and completely inadequate storage. The calligraphic inscription on the wall is a quote from St. Francis: "Preach the Gospel always -- if necessary use words."

Below is another corner of the room, moving clockwise to the right. The sketches on the wall eventually became a large pastel that I gave to my parents. I still like that red Conté sketch, though, now that I see it here; it must be in my flat file still.

On the fourth wall I had a revolving gallery of drawings - the large portrait of my mother is on the wall of my present studio, too.

We had another building -- a garage with a large open space above that J. used for photography. On the ground floor were two other small rooms, one a woodworking shop, and the other, my painting studio and meditation room, shown below. When I saw this photograph today, I felt again the peacefulness I always enjoyed in that room. It was very much my own, and the desk looked out over the garden. The bookcase is right in front of me as I write this, and the easel and desk are here in my present studio as well. The rocking chair, which was my mother-in-law's, was sold; the Japanese cloth is folded up somewhere, as is that pretty lace curtain. The antique lamps and brackets are in a box; I haven't had a good place to put them. The Cezanne poster, faded and rolled up now, is from an extraordinary retrospective at MOMA that I saw way back in 1978 or so and still remember vividly.

I don't feel nostalgic -- our workspaces now are so much more
functional, with wonderful light and much more space -- I simply remember
the many hours I spent in this particular room, above, pondering life and trying to grow, feeling
supported by objects that reminded me of the best parts of life, and
people who were and still are dear to me. It all comes back very swiftly when I look at these photographs.

September 12, 2012

It feels just like back-to-school here: September began, and all of a sudden everything and everybody ramped up. So since I haven't had time to write anything, I thought I'd post a watercolor from almost twenty years ago. These are sunflowers I grew in my Vermont garden, where in late August and September I always had a big group of them nodding outside my studio window. Except for the ones that made their way into the house or the studio, we left them in the garden for the goldfinches and purple finches to feast on, and enjoyed watching the birds as much as the flowers.

I'm also remembering my great-aunt Inez today; this is the week of her birthday (she would have been about 115!) and she was a very good watercolorist who loved to paint flowers too.

I really like this expressive, free style of watercolor; I was just starting to get comfortable and free with it when I stopped painting very much and began writing more. Right now, I don't know quite how I'm going to keep working at either my art and writing this fall; it certainly won't be with the same focus as this summer. We've got a bunch of professional work to do, Phoenicia has more books coming out before Christmas, choir has begun again, I'm teaching/leading monthly meditation at the cathedral, and there's company coming for various visits starting tomorrow, and a couple of short trips out of town for us as well.

However, in the spirit of last night's first meditation session: deep breaths, calmness, and a reminder-to-self, via the sunflowers, that everything is fine, just as it is, right this moment.